EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 90 Number-like Words 492 / 600
(all colloq.)
5- petero-
6- šestero-
7- sedmero-
8- osmero-
When such adjectives – derived from relative adjectives of time periods – are used
with people and animals, they mean three-year-old, forty-year-old, etc. For
example:
Dovela je šestogodišnjeg sina A . She brought her six-year-old son. dovesti past-f
Note that the words derived from šesto- can mean both 6- and 600-; therefore,
some people write compounds derived from 600- as šeststo-. In real life, confusion
is rare – there are very few 600-year-olds around.
The second type uses suffix -ak to create numbers (not adjectives!) that correspond
to English -odd. They are formed only from ‘round’ numbers, such as:
desetak ten-odd
dvadesetak twenty-odd
stotinjak hundred-odd
Such numbers behave like 10, 20 and 100 – i.e. like quantity adverbs – G-pl is used
with them, and the whole phrase behaves as neuter singular:
Desetak ljudi G je na plaži DL . Ten-odd people are on the beach.
The third type are nouns derived from smaller numbers using -ica and -ka (the
derivation is not regular, forms must be remembered):
1 → jedinica
2 → dvojka
3 → trojka
4 → četvorka
5 → petica
6 → šestica
7 → sedmica
8 → osmica
9 → devetka
10 → desetka
They mean e.g. ‘digit two’, or colloquially, something with the number on it, e.g. a
playing card, bus or tram – depending on the context:
Čekat ću šesticu A . (colloq.) I’ll wait for a number 6 tram.
However nouns derived from 1, 3 and 4 have special meanings as well:
jedinica unit
trojka three-person team
četvorka four-person team
(English sometimes uses a noun for the three-person team, taken from Russian:
troika. You see it’s almost identical to Croatian.)
For two-person teams (and other two-item groups), the common word is par pair.
The fourth type are nouns for ‘x-year-olds’ (i.e. boys/girls, men/women, but